Now, not never: producing high quality children’s books in underserved languages

• In Event: Building sustainable book supply chains through digital platforms: open licensing, content creation, and support for local publishers and authors

Proposal

Our organization addresses the problem of book scarcity through an ecosystem approach that creates, shares, and distributes children’s books cheaper, faster, and to more underserved languages than is currently possible in traditional publishing. Our model creates a sustainable book chain across Asia that involves authors, illustrators, editors, translators and publishers to produce highly relatable e-books and print books in local languages. And, it extends that chain through partnerships with reading advocates and direct outreach to families to ensure these books get read.

We will present seven components that are strongly linked to make the book chain effective. First, since we work in geographies where both the supply and demand for books in underserved languages is low, training at every step of the book chain is essential. We use short, intensive workshops and events with pools of budding and writers, illustrators, editors and translators to simultaneously build skills and produce books. Second, we sign Creative Commons agreements with all who participate – whether their content has been previously published in print or is newly created or translated. Third, we built a free-to-use, intuitive, digital library that is accessible online, offline, and in print through web and Android apps. Fourth, we designed a built-in translation platform that organizes volunteers and editors to quickly contribute high quality translations. Fifth, anyone can access and read the books online or offline or print them from our web or mobile app with no login required. Sixth, we encourage publishers to lay-out, print and sell books from our platform to reach more readers. Finally, each book that is added to our platform immediately becomes available for translation into other languages, causing the digital library to grow exponentially.

Using book chains in South and Southeast Asia as examples, we will demonstrate our applied research findings from the past 2 years of operation on how this ecosystem approach creates a sizable free library that starts children on the path of reading while simultaneously supporting print publishers.

Authors

• Kyle Barker, Books for Asia

• Melody Zavala, The Asia Foundation